


Horizon

by robotsdance



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, MSR, On the Run, Post-The Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-11 10:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4432232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsdance/pseuds/robotsdance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their first couple years on the run are like a series of photographs taken by a person who couldn’t hold the camera still. There are patches of overwhelming colour in high definition, bursting and overexposed, and other parts so lost in the motion blur they have been smeared out of existence altogether.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Horizon

Their first couple years on the run are like a series of photographs taken by a person who couldn’t hold the camera still. There are patches of overwhelming colour in high definition, bursting and overexposed, and other parts so lost in the motion blur they have been smeared out of existence altogether.

Time drifts past them as a distant haze, no longer a particularly useful metric for measuring their lives.

Instead they have granola bars eaten as they clumsily pack up their secondhand tent. Brushing their teeth on the side of the road with water from a shared bottle, warm from so much time in the sun. Sunglasses tans and taking turns choosing the radio station and sleeping in the car when they have to. Another boring set of assumed names, tried on for size as they drive.  Another horizon to chase through the night. Another universe between them to explore.

They whisper their real names between the sheets of yet another bed they rented in cash. Breathe and trace and mark them on to each other’s skin in the fading light. All they have left. All they need. Mulder. Scully.

Just them, tangled under the blankets of a crummy motel at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, sunlight edging its way through the crack in the blinds. Mulder still mostly asleep but stirring beside her, shifting closer as she turns to meet him. She presses up against him, her hand on his chest, silently marveling at his heartbeat, slow and steady under her palm.

He murmurs her name like it’s the only truth he will ever need.

——

Reinventing their history is a car game now. By the time they roll into another unremarkable town and pay for another mundane motel, they have agreed on who they will be while they’re there. Charlie and Veronica. Mark and Sarah. John and Christina.

Scully helps brainstorm the names and some of the details, but really, this is Mulder’s place to shine. His eyes light up every time she asks him who they’ll be next, always ready to tell a story about a version of them finding each other. He throws in a ridiculous detail or two that he knows she’ll gently object to when he’s not sure if she’s fallen asleep listening to him ramble. She rarely does, too captivated by the realities created solely by the sound of his voice to abandon consciousness altogether. He’s always had this power: remarkable stories, unremarkable stories, they all seem extraordinary coming from him.

Today there’s an ache in her chest as there sometimes is, listening to him weave another version of a story that ends with the two of them sitting in this car together, knowing that William will never make Mulder tell him ‘just one more’ story until it’s way past his bed time. She squeezes her eyes shut, let’s the rush of wind through the open window wash over her, unsure if she’s trying to hold on to the image or push it away. Both hurt.

“Scully?” Mulder asks, clearly not for the first time.

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever get homesick?” Mulder offers the question softly, like he’s afraid to know the answer. But this is Mulder and he seeks the truth, no matter how much it has the power to destroy him.

“No,” she answers immediately.

How could she? Mulder is right here.

——

Mulder looks over at her, the grin on his face making him look much younger than he is. 

“We were going to stop for food,” Scully reminds him good-naturedly, already accepting her fate as an attendee of-

“The County Spring Fair will DEFINITELY have food,” Mulder counters, fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

She’s trying not to look too amused but she is failing and she knows it and so does Mulder so he steers them towards the fair without further discussion.

They wander through the fair ground hand in hand. Mulder points out a game and leans into her to explain exactly how it’s rigged so no one can win. Scully looks up at him and gives him the look that she knows makes his heart skip a beat before she steps up to the booth.

She wins a goldfish on her first try and presents it triumphantly to Mulder. It’s not the enormous stuffed hippopotamus he’d been eyeing, but he carries the plastic bag around like it’s the most precious cargo.

To Mulder’s credit, they do eventually find food. They sit at a picnic table, the fish plopped on the table between them, and they watch it swim in circles in its plastic bag as they eat.

On their way back to the car Mulder notices a family with two young children, the older of the two has a goldfish, while the younger child is very obviously lacking a prize fish. Mulder gestures to the parents as he approaches using the universal (if rarely used) body language for 'Can I give your son this goldfish?'. They give Mulder the go-ahead, so he moves to greet the boy.

After the fish has changed hands, Mulder leans in and says something to the boy that Scully can’t hear, but the boy looks over at her and then back to Mulder and smiles.

——

She wakes up to the sound of birds squawking. Twists further into the bedding as she stretches and yawns. Eventually opens her eyes to look around. They had crashed into this particular motel room so late the night before that she hadn’t bothered to admire the dull orange walls or the wonky antenna on the TV before she landed face first on the bed and slept.

She reaches for her bag, which Mulder had thoughtfully placed near her side of the bed, and pulls out her toothbrush. She starts brushing her teeth as she pads across the worn carpet towards the bathroom.

She finds Mulder there doing laundry in the sink, soap bubbles sticking to his arm hair, his t-shirt damp in a chaotic pattern from wayward splashes. The shower curtain rod already has a couple of his shirts and a couple of hers hanging from it, washed and waiting to dry.

He looks up at her in the mirror and smiles, and there’s that ache in her chest again. The one she associates with him.

He says good morning as she spits into the toilet so as not to contaminate the sink.

“Good morning,” she answers as she watches him rinse the soap from his boxers. What glamorous lives they lead, she muses, reminding herself to wash the dirty bras smushed up at the bottom of her bag when Mulder is done.

——

“We need to leave,” Scully says, calm but calculating, after she closes the door to their room carefully behind her. Mulder doesn’t say a word, just leaps to his feet and starts shoving their few possessions into the nearest bag while Scully does the same as she sweeps through the bathroom.

“The FBI is in town,” Scully says once they are safely in the car and driving away from the motel, Scully checking the rearview mirror a few more times than strictly necessary, “I don’t know why. I saw a pair of agents getting lunch.” She doesn’t say that it was probably nothing.

“Better safe than sorry,” Mulder agrees.

——

They’d been talking about this for a while now, Mulder always the one saying they could make it happen without compromising their or her mother’s safety: A payphone in a place they don’t stay in for any longer than they have to, no names or locations, no indication they will make further contact any time soon. For months she was the one saying no. No, it’s fine. No, it’s too risky. No, it’s not worth it.

Today she’s standing in a dusty phone booth at a gas station on the edge of nowhere, pocket change in hand.

She hears her mom’s tearful voice in her head as she fiddles with the quarters, working up the courage to put them in the phone. She thinks about her mom helping box up the stuff at her abandoned apartment. She thinks about being the strong one and how she’s her only daughter now. She looks over at Mulder, who’s sitting on the hood of the car, giving her space, both watching and not watching her.

She inhales deeply before she drops the first coin into the phone and starts to dial.

It has already rang twice when she realizes she has no idea what she’s going to say. She’s been running different versions of this conversation in her head for ages now but-

Three rings. It didn’t occur to Scully until right now that her mom might not be home. She moves to check her watch to see if she called at a bad time and realizes she isn’t wearing one.

Four rings. Scully prays that her mom picks up the phone. Prays that the universe grant her this.

Five rings. She’s not there.

The machine kicks in and Scully doesn’t fight the way the recorded greeting chokes her up as she listens to her mom kindly invite callers to leave a message after the beep.

“Mom… It’s me-” she says it like the apology she needs it to be, “I just want to let you know that I’m okay-” she stops, looks over at a Mulder and corrects herself, “We’re okay.” She blinks back tears as she looks up and watches a spider scuttle across its web in the upper corner of the phone booth. This is so much harder than she thought it would be,  “I miss you-” She pauses again, silence taking the place of all the promises she’d like to make (“see you soon!”) but knows she won’t be able to keep. She doesn’t know what else to say, so she closes with a quiet, “I love you.”

She hangs up the phone and allows herself a moment of stillness before she makes her way back to Mulder. She sits down beside him and takes the bottle of water he wordlessly offers. He says nothing, just sits beside her in silence, waiting until she is ready to speak.

“It was the machine,” Scully says eventually, “I left a message.”

“What did you say?” Mulder asks.

“Just that we’re okay.”

Mulder considers this, considers her, “We are okay, aren’t we?”

She puts her hand on his, “We’re okay.”

——

They collapse into room #12, dumping their luggage just inside the door. Scully is desperately looking forward to taking a shower that isn’t coin operated (they’re fresh off a stint of camping, and their latest camp ground fell somewhere between “extremely basic” and “well below average” in terms of accommodations), but Mulder is antsy, digging through his bag and alternating between pacing the room, looking out the window, and flipping through a small notebook.

They took turns driving all night, and he had spent most of his turn to sleep babbling about slugs and the cosmos and something about a really good sandwich he’d had a few states back that he was still trying to identify the ingredients of.

She doesn’t especially want to do anything that doesn’t involve a lot of soap and water, but Mulder is just going to spin his wheels if she doesn’t shake him out of it.

“Want to go for a run?” she asks, “I’ll come with you if you want.”

Mulder looks up from his notebook to look at her. There is still a part of him that is so unused to being taken care of that he notices it explicitly, and she can see his demeanor shift when he realizes she’s actively identifying his needs and working to help meet them. It still surprises him that someone cares about him enough to do this and it breaks her heart a little every time.

Mulder is grateful she offered to join him, but after a brief moment of consideration he politely declines. “No, you stay here,” he says gently, “I know you’re looking forward to a bath.”

A bath. She practically swoons at the thought of sinking into a tub full of hot soapy water. It’s been ages. She looks up at him, trying to figure out how she manages to forget that he’s as good at reading her needs as she is at reading his.

She watches him put on his running shoes and waits until he is out the door before venturing to the bathroom to see if a bath is even a possibility. The bathroom in this motel is surprisingly nice, or maybe her standards have just adjusted to her new reality. Either way, the tub looks clean and she’s more than overdue.

The motel may be nicer than some they’ve stayed in, but not nice enough to provide bubble bath. However, Mulder had given her some a few weeks ago and she can’t help but smile when she digs it out of her suitcase: A bottle shaped like a flying saucer with a neon green alien sticking out of the top. The purple text on the front advertises, “Have a bubble bath that’s out of this world!”

She gamely pulls off the alien’s little plastic head and pours the alarmingly pink liquid from its neck into the running water. It doesn’t smell half-bad either (although again, maybe her standards aren’t what they used to be, and she’s sure that she, fresh from several days of camping, is in no position to complain about soap of any kind).

Submerging herself in the ever so slightly too hot water is even better than she hoped it would be.

She soaks until her muscles feel loose and heavy and the cosmic bubbles have dispersed into the now slightly murky water. She feels recharged, her battery back up close to 100%.

She drains the tub and spends 30 seconds in the shower to rinse off any lingering soap residue before reaching for a towel.

When she emerges from the bathroom Mulder is sitting on the edge of the bed watching a baseball game on TV with the sound off. He’s still in his running clothes, which are a combination of sweaty and muddy, but he looks much calmer than an hour ago.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” Scully tells him, “I would have hurried so you could shower.”

“I didn’t want to cut your bath short,” he replies.

She smiles at him appreciatively, “Feel better?”

He nods, “You?”

She hums contently as he stands and heads towards the shower, pausing to kiss her briefly as he passes.

He returns from the bathroom ten minutes later, a towel haphazardly wrapped around his waist, the scent of alien bubble bath wafting off him.

——

There’s a meteor shower tonight. When the radio says so Mulder pulls over immediately. They throw down a sleeping bag in the middle of a field, lie down and look up. Soon light streaks across the sky above them. Mulder calls them shooting stars. Scully calls them comet debris breaking up in the atmosphere.

Either way, it’s beautiful.

Shoulder to shoulder, leaning into each other, they trace the paths of light with their hands held tight. The night air is cool, but Mulder’s leg is warm against hers.

“Make a wish Scully,” Mulder says softly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

 _This,_ she thinks as her eyes fall closed and his lips brush against hers. _This._

——

She had gone out for some very basic supplies. Mulder needed shaving cream, she needed deodorant. They both needed some food that wasn’t from a restaurant with a cartoon mascot. She’d taken the car and told him she’d be back within the hour.

Today the universe had other plans.

When she got to the grocery store they’d seen on their way through town, a sign on the door informed her that there had been some sort of power outage and they were closed for the rest of the day. A young man had helpfully given her directions to the next closest grocery store, which was on the other side of town.

His directions had been based on some curious landmarks (turn left past the house with the chicken mail box, after that look for the purple boat on the side of the road and turn right) but she had managed to find it without much difficultly. If it hadn’t been for the pipe bursting, she probably would have made it back within her original time frame.

A water pipe burst a little ways down the road she had used to get there, and as such, the road was closed and she had to find an alternate way back. A stranger gave her a route (drawn on the back of a napkin) that would get her there eventually, with eventually being the operative word.

The single route available to her is shockingly crowded. She suspects there was a car accident a few miles ahead, and this combined with the people who were forced to avoid the main road due to the water pipe were the reason she is currently sitting in traffic watching the clock with increasing anxiety.

She and Mulder have contingency plans, in case one of them ever gets snagged while they are separated (and they are rarely separated for more than an hour here or there). But still, there is protocol in place for if one of them doesn’t return within a certain window. She is very aware that Mulder is looking at the clock every few moments, just as she is, calculating exactly how much time has had before-

She doesn’t want to think about it.

She can’t remember the last time she got stuck in traffic like this. Not since she left the city. Not since she and Mulder never have anywhere to be at a specific time. Now, if traffic sucks, they pull over, or turn around. It’s a lot easier to commute if you don’t much care where you’re going.

She checks the clock again, she still has approximately 45 minutes before Mulder will even consider acting on her delayed return. Of course, this is Mulder, and holding still while he thinks she’s even possibly in danger is easier said than done.

She hates that she hadn’t yet memorized the motel’s phone number. She’s supposed to do that. They both are (although Mulder’s obscenely good memory means that he, no doubt, had it in his head before they unlocked their room). Although as she scans her surroundings, she has to admit that there aren’t exactly a lot of options for pay phones from which to call him to say traffic is terrible.

As soon as she can get back to the street the motel is on and off the crowded detour route, she’ll be able to get moving, she tells herself, recalculating the exact amount of time she has before Mulder puts Step One into action. She runs through the steps in her head. Worst case scenario she meets him at the nearest emergency rendezvous point at the scheduled time and assures him it was a false alarm, but even the idea of having to follow the first few steps of an emergency plan is horrifying. She hates the idea of making Mulder worry. She doesn’t want him out there, alone and fearing the worst and having no way to know what happened to her.

They’ve both been there before, and she hopes against all hope that they never, ever get there again.

It’s another agonizing 28 minutes before she is able to turn back on to the road she needs to be on. She’s torn between speeding and Driving The Speed Limit. ('Follow the speed limit' is one of their many rules for Not Attracting Unwanted Attention, but they hadn’t discussed its priority level if there were only eight minutes left before one of them seriously worried that the other had been caught or kidnapped or-)

Her heart is pounding when she pulls into the parking lot of their current motel. By her calculations, she’s still got two minutes before Mulder considers taking action. She hopes Mulder’s calculations are similar and he didn’t jump the gun.

She doesn’t pick up the bag full of hard won supplies, just parks the car and leaps out, rushing towards their room, praying he hasn’t done anything drastic and she has to run back to the car and-

He’s on his feet and moving towards her to make sure she’s alright before she’s even got the door open.

“I’m fine. There was traffic,” she tells his chest as he wraps his arms around her and she pulls him closer as relief washes over her in a wave of overwhelming gratitude, “and a broken water pipe and a car accident and the first store was closed and-"

They hold each other securely until their heart rates have steadiest and slowed.

——

Mulder doesn’t ask about William. Not out loud. But Scully can feel him wondering when the comfortable silence between them has time to settle and shift on those long stretches of highway.

He holds none of it against her. She almost wishes he would.

Mulder pulls over abruptly, jarring Scully from her train of thought and she looks over at him questioningly.

“I need to stretch my legs,” Mulder explains as he climbs out of the car and reaches towards the sky with an exaggerated groan.

Scully steps out the car as she looks at the place Mulder has chosen to stop: an entrance to collection of hiking trails that weave their way through a forest.

“Any ulterior motives I should know about?” Scully asks, “Any werewolves in these woods?”

“It’s not even a full moon Scully,” Mulder says as he shakes his head, looking only slightly discouraged, “Just need to get out of the car for a bit. Figured you might too.”

He’s not wrong.

They look at the map posted helpfully at the start of the trail and pick the yellow path: a simple loop through the woods.

They wander along the trail mostly in silence, breathing deeply and enjoying the sunlight filtering through the leaves above them. There are no werewolves, mothmen or monsters of any kind on the yellow path (Mulder jokes that they must all be on the blue trail with only a hint of disappointment in his voice).

They’re almost back to the car when a bee starts buzzing around Scully with singular focus, following her best evasive maneuvers with a surprising amount of persistence.

“NOT TODAY,” Mulder declares gallantly, swatting at the bee in an overly dramatic fashion, which is effective only at making the bee angrier.

The bee stings Scully, but this time she kisses him anyway.

——

“Which way today?” Mulder asks as he sometimes does and Scully points to whichever edge of the world looks most appealing to her that day.

——

A young girl collapses in the parking lot of their motel as they are coming back for the night and Scully springs into action without second thought, striding over and taking charge of the situation.

Even on the run, she is a medical doctor. No cover story about traveling school teachers can hold that down when a little girl’s life is on the line.

She has the girl stabilized by the time the ambulance shows up a few minutes later and the girl’s parents babble heartfelt thank yous and make Scully tell them which room they are staying in so they can thank her properly later.

Mulder and Scully check out of the motel as soon as the ambulance is out of sight.

——

Mulder strips down to his boxers beside the small dock leading out into the lake. He bunches up his shirt and jeans into a ball and drops them beside his shoes and then watches as Scully pulls off her shirt, folds it neatly, and places it beside his things. She repeats this process with her pants, until she is looking up at him wearing only a sports bra and panties like she’s not quite sure how he talked her into this. She moves to take a step towards the lake but Mulder’s eyes light up with sudden realization.

“Hold on!” he says as he digs a disposable camera out of the pocket of his jeans. Scully crosses her arms and sighs, but lets him put his arm around her as he holds the camera as far out in front of them as he can and snaps what is sure to be the least flattering picture of them ever taken.

She rolls her eyes and mentions (not for the first time) that there’s a button on the back of the camera that activates a ten second timer.

“Probably invented by someone with short arms,” Mulder replies undeterred as he drops the camera on to his clothes and heads towards the lake, “Come on Scully.”

She follows him.

Scully watches his expression transition from that of an enthusiastic puppy to that of a man who may have made a mistake in the exact amount of time it takes his brain to register the temperature of the lake on his exposed skin.

The lake is not warm. She had told him this when he came up with this brilliant idea. No one else is swimming. Barely anyone else is camping to begin with, and none of them are standing ankle-deep in the lake in their boxers.

He soldiers on, taking a few laborious steps forward, stopping when the water laps around his knees.

He’s looking out across the lake and Scully seizes the opportunity to charge across the length of the dock in a focused run. She is grateful that Mulder looks over at her just as she leaps off the end of the dock because his expression of shock might have to sustain her when she hits the water.

The lake is fucking cold.

She surfaces as fast as she is able and quickly closes in on where Mulder is, taking great care to splash as much as humanly possible during this process. Mulder’s stunned expression (and high pitched shrieks) makes the fact that she may never regain the feeling in her extremities worth it.

When he finds the ability to speak in words he starts with, “You do always keep me-"

A face full of water cuts him off.

He yelps, indignant, then grins. She can see the moment he formally accepts her invitation to play cross his face right before he flops into the lake beside her. 

The water is still cold, but as they chase each other around in a whirlwind of ungraceful strokes and her giggles carry across the lake, neither of them really notices.

After they have dried off (thanks to the noble efforts of two thin towels taken from a motel a few months back) and put on every sweater they own (which at this point in time is three) they raid the cooler they keep in the backseat for something they will call dinner, regardless of its actual nutritional value.

Later, fingers sticky with marshmallow and chocolate, she leans against him and they watch the sparks from the campfire dance in the night like fireflies.

——

The diner is vaguely comforting in its anonymous familiarity. There are hundreds, if not thousands much like it and at this point, Scully’s half-certain she and Mulder have eaten at every single one.

The waitress politely asks Scully what their story is while Mulder is in the restroom and Scully takes a sip of water to give herself a moment to think about her answer to that question.

She and Mulder usually quiz each other in the car about their new history so that they’ll have their stories straight if anyone ever asks. They hadn’t gotten that far today. In fact they had barely settled on names. Scully smiles, ready to take the opportunity presented to her.

Mulder returns to the table in time to hear Scully say, “He used to be an underwear model.”

The woman is not subtle as she checks Mulder out as he slides into the booth across from Scully and tries not to look too amused.

“So how did we meet?” Mulder asks once the waitress is out of earshot, “Were you my photographer or something?”

Scully shakes her head, “There was a fire alarm at a hotel we were both staying at. We met in the parking lot wearing bathrobes and pondered if the building was actually on fire.”

“Was it?” Mulder asks as if she has a real answer, already desperate for the rest of the story.

She tells him what he wants to hear.

——

The air conditioning unit in room 502 is not technically broken, but the only discernible difference between the on and off setting is the amount of noise it makes.

Scully is trying (and failing) to read the medical journal she recently picked up and Mulder is writing. Well, Mulder is hunched over a pad of paper absentmindedly twirling a pencil. Scully watches him, watches the pencil travel back and forth between his fingers, notices the way his t-shirt clings to the muscles in his arms, wonders what thoughts are drifting through him right now and if she would be a welcome addition.

She rests her hand on his shoulder first, letting him know she is near, and then grazes her fingers through his hair (it’s getting long, but it suits him).

“Hey,” she says quietly as he leans further into her touch as his eyes close.

“Hi,” he breathes in response.

And so the familiar dance begins:

Lingering touches. Moments of significant silence. Tension, tight and tangible between them. His hand on the small of her back. Echoes of a thousand moments shared in basement offices and neighbouring motel rooms. Finding each other in the dark. Orbiting each other, the pull of gravity between them greater than any other force on earth.

They surrender to it completely.

——

There is no cake. No two candles glowing bright. No balloons. No enthusiastic renditions of happy birthday.

They make a wish anyway:

_Let him be safe. Let him be happy._

_Safe and happy._

_Please._

And then the unspoken, most terrible, most desperate footnote:

_Let us see him again._

——

Scully sees a billboard for a drive-in and follows the directions it provides (next exit on the left!) while Mulder is snoring softly in the passenger seat. He wakes as she is pulling into the entrance and blinks at his surroundings, a dopey smile on his face.

They mostly watch the first movie and mostly ignore the second one in favour of playfully making out in the backseat.

“Please tell me we’re staying somewhere with a bed tonight,” Mulder says against her neck.

They’re both over-stimulated and overrun with what they spent so many years denying so it takes her a few seconds, but when Scully confirms this to be the case Mulder looks immensely relieved.

“How far is it from here?” he asks, voice rough with intention.

“You don’t want to see the end of… what movie are we watching?” Scully asks and Mulder laughs against her shoulder.

——

“Ask me about him,” Scully tells him quietly as she sits down beside him on the edge of the bed.

He looks at her, a flicker of doubt crossing his face, as if he can’t quite register what he knows she means. She holds his gaze, silently reassuring him, until he speaks.

“What was he like?”

‘Small’ is the first word to pop into her head but that’s not what Mulder is asking. And ‘small’ is no more helpful than the rush of miraculous feelings she could never hope to condense into words, not in a million years, not even for Mulder. But this is Mulder asking so she’ll try.

“Full of hope and wonder and love-” she manages to say before her throat is too tight to continue. _Like you_ , Scully thinks fiercely, unable to get the final words past her lips, overwhelmed by the truth of them.

Mulder’s hand finds hers and he holds on the way he does when she is the only constant thing in his universe. “Like you,” he says.

She shakes her head, but can’t make herself correct him. He was always so much better with words at times like these. She’s already silently reaching for him as she did in countless moments of agonizing stillness between them over the years. She touches his face, hoping he understands

“Like us,” Mulder corrects himself. He exhales, breathes, believes.

She nods.

Yes.

——

“How did we meet?” Scully asks late one night from behind the wheel, the lines on the highway guiding them towards another darkened horizon.

“Is it time for another one?” Mulder asks from the passenger seat where he is mostly asleep, “We didn’t use the beekeeper one yet, did we?”

“No,” Scully says, “But how did _we_ meet?”

“You were sent to spy on me,” Mulder says fondly, “To debunk my work.”

“Then what?” she prompts.

“Everything Scully.”

She keeps her eyes on the road, but she can tell he’s smiling by way he says those two words like they mean exactly the same thing.


End file.
